Our Sun Has a Sister
The ancient Egyptians called it Ra. The ancient Greeks called it Helios. The ancient Mayans called it Kinich Ahau. The ancient Germans called it Sól.
Our longest-standing and most deeply held myths have so often revolved around the sun in large part because we humans have revolved around the sun. That distant sphere of glowing gas has been, to us fragile creatures, warmth and light and life itself. It has, we now know, been the center of everything we've known. No wonder we've assumed it was divine.
(http://globalfinance.zenfs.com/en_us/Finance/FIN_US_AHTTP_THEATLANTIC/Our_Sun_Has_a_Sister-4d3ed0d892be97bcd741bcfe5095be95)
Which makes news just coming out of the University of Texas at Austin—soon to be reported in The Astrophysical Journal—particularly monumental. Our familiar star, it turns out, is not unique. Our sun has a sibling—a sister-star that almost certainly originated from the same cloud of gas and dust as our own shining orb.
That sibling? A star with the deceptively dull name of HD 162826. Said star is 15 percent more massive than our sun, and located 110 light-years away from us (in the constellation Hercules, which is, appropriately, un-dully named). We can't see the sun's sister unaided, but even a set of low-power binoculars reveals HD 162826 to human eyes. It's situated near (well, relatively near) the bright star of Vega.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/sun-sister-215510093.html